


Forever and Always

by Cactaceae28



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Spock (Star Trek), Childhood Friends, Demisexual T'Pring, Episode: s02e05 Amok Time, Implied cultural aphobia, Other, Pre-Canon, Protective T'Pring, Queerplatonic Relationships, Trektober 2020, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:07:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26840392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cactaceae28/pseuds/Cactaceae28
Summary: T’Pring would have worried that she was broken, that somehow she had been born with a part of her missing, if she didn’t have Spock; because in him she found a perfect mirror to her thoughts.
Relationships: James T. Kirk & Leonard "Bones" McCoy & Spock, Spock & T'Pring (Star Trek), Stonn/T'Pring (Star Trek)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 47
Collections: Trektober 2020





	Forever and Always

**Author's Note:**

> For Trektober 2020 Day 5: Pining

When she was seven, T’Pring had hated Spock with the shameful passion of an untrained child. She had felt the foreign weight of the new gateway to her mind and had hated the one it led to, because she could not yet bring herself to hate the ones who had put it there. In the taste of their mental bond, she had known that she was hated in turn.

It was later, much later, when their childhoods were left behind, that slowly things began to change for them; when they found common ground in an absence inside them that they could perceive, but never fully define.

They first became allies when they began to notice that the fire that consumed others’ minds and bodies was not there between them. They became friends when they realized that it was not there, even if they looked elsewhere for it.

T’Pring would have worried that she was broken, that somehow she had been born with a part of her missing, if she didn’t have Spock; because in him she found a perfect mirror to her thoughts. In this, they were of a mind and through this, they grew closer.

She was fourteen when her brother first went through the Fever and left their household for a new home with his wife. There had been an air of satisfaction to him that puzzled her and he had only told her that she would understand one day, when she was older and her time with her betrothed first came.

She told Spock of the conversation in hushed whispers and bluntly told him that she did not wish it, that she felt nothing at the thought of joining in the sacred grounds. She could, she clarified to him, do her duty as a wife; for the prize of his life, it would not even be a hardship. By now she had begun to love him, in a way, yet she could not bring herself to anticipate the moment.

He concurred in her assessment. He cared for her, he admired her, but he did not want her. Their hope, he added, was that through his mother’s line he might be spared from suffering the ancient drives, and outside of that moment they could continue forever and always as they were now, never parted but never touching.

When T’Pring was fifteen, Spock’s brother was struck from all records, banished and forever disgraced for his seditious teachings. She had never cared for his presence, for his casual cruelty disguised as world-weary experience; in fact she cared for him far less than she cared for the human ward in the S’chn T’gai household and refused to mourn his departure.

Still, she opened the window to her room and let Spock slip in during the afternoon hours, quietly doing her assigned homework while he laid spread-eagle on her bed and sorted through his feelings with vacant eyes. She never betrayed a word when his father punished him for disappearing and bumped shoulders with him when they met on the way to the educational centre the morning after.

When she was on the eve of seventeen, Sarek’s ward was denied a place among their scholars and was immediately sponsored aboard an exploratory Starfleet vessel. She held her tongue and coolly shunned the Ambassador and his wife whenever she could excuse her rudeness. Instead of speaking out, she poured over ridiculously easy algebra problems and ethical questions written in Standard, studying variations of the Academy’s entrance exams under the shade of the old tree in Spock’s home to show her support.

Their formative period was ending, and their peers and teachers started speculating openly about their future. They assumed T’Pring would enter the VSA without problem, but in spite of the fact that Spock surpassed her and most of their peers, they remained sceptical about whether he would follow suit.

They were correct, though not quite in the way they assumed. Spock’s heritage was not the hindrance they believed –how could it be, with what he had done to prove himself? How was their blindness logical?—, but something, perhaps even the human in his blood, had always sung for the unknown. She had long since realized that it wasn’t the familiar sight of the stars but the far-off void and the promise of its secrets that called to him.

He had asked, once, when they had snuck out to watch the darkened canopy above them, if she would consider accompanying him. For him, she might have, but he didn’t need her and her place was here. It was Vulcan that held her katra and he had known that. There had been no expectation in his voice.

It seemed that she was the only one in their social circles who had anticipated his decision to stray from the path laid out for him however, the only one who had let him go without conditions and thus, the only tie he kept in the immediate aftermath.

So she ignored the speculative glances in her direction from those who knew they were promised to each other and walked with her head high, moving into the adult’s world at last.

It was in her new post at the VSA where she first met Stonn. He was caring behind an indifferent exterior. He listened to her theories and acknowledged her intelligence, and was intelligent enough to match her, pushing her further into fields she wouldn’t have considered alone. He had passion buried under a deceptive calm expression; he knew what it meant to have never quite lived up to what others had expected of them.

In their correspondence, Spock told her of a command team who grew to value him and his opinions: a man who slowly began filling the space Sarek had abandoned –T’Pring could read it in every Captain, hear it in his voice, but she wondered if Spock realized the place Pike held in his heart and if this human realized the gift he had been given in turn—, and his second, a woman with the spirit of Surak inside of her.

In this manner, slowly, both started to unfurl their wings, away for the first time from their parents’ shadow. They began to grow.

All throughout the war between the Klingons and the Federation her thoughts remained with Spock; the weeks stretched into months and she held onto his scarce transmissions. If something happened to him in that Starfleet ship, would she be told? Through the crisis that followed —one she only knew through whispers and impressions travelling down the bond— she did her best to remain a constant source of strength and despaired of her inadequacy.

When it was over she travelled for the first time outside her planet, just to hold him as he mourned a loss he had been ordered, once again, to forget.

It wasn’t until she returned, when the quadrant finally seemed to settle and life resumed unchallenged for the beings within it, and she could breathe without worry again, that she finally acknowledged a change within herself. In the past months of slow acquaintance to colleagues to something more personal, Stonn had become a part of her life on Vulcan; and not only that.

The more Stonn became a constant in her life, the more she came to trust him and to expect his presence, the more she realized that, if it was him, she wanted something different. She burned for Stonn in a way that she had never experienced for any other, like she hadn’t believed possible. For the first time she understood what others meant when they spoke of a desire for the flesh; for the first time she found her meditation disturbed by the promise of a future shared in mind and body.

Stonn would accept her, she knew, if only she asked. A part of her wanted to pursue that possibility. A bond, unique and crafted just by the two of them without outside interference, just for them.

Yet a Vulcan’s loyalty, when earned, was almost impossible to displace. If she accepted Spock’s offer for a discreet parting of ways, his parents would push him into another match, one who likely would not understand the way his love ran differently from others, no less intense but fully removed from the want of joining.

If he tried to refuse, even if his diluted heritage made it unlikely that he would ever suffer through the Fever, the pressures imposed upon him by their strict society would multiply. She could not leave him to another disappointment, another obstacle to consider, one more bond that had to be treated with caution instead of the open sharing of minds that he should have known from those who claimed to care.

Vulcans control their minds and their hearts so she took the new, mature hatred bubbling in her breast for the ones that had pushed them into this labyrinth without an exit or a centre in sight —her parents, who would not wait for her; his parents, who could not or did not see— and tempered it into fine steel, used it to fuel her resolve to lock her feelings for Stonn away.

If no one else would, if all those who should have supported Spock let his wellbeing be a second thought in their minds, then _she_ would put him first.

 _She_ would be his shield, even if she could only defend him from this.

 _She_ would chose him, even if it wounded her.

Honesty had always been their way; Stonn slipped more frequently in her communications, though the offers to free her from their betrothal grew scarcer in deference to her decision.

She still allowed herself to accept Stonn’s friendship, though nothing further. She shared quiet days with him, having tea together under the disapproving stares of others. She didn’t hide that she would not be remiss in her duties to her betrothed, but allowed Stonn to work silently by her terminal with his fingers resting far too close to hers, and sometimes when the lights grew dim outside she was reminded of the afternoons back when she and Spock had been but teenagers, when their enemies had been tangible and the future had been vague but endless.

In time, Spock started mentioning two new humans in his communications as well, cautiously, like the simple act of acknowledging their existence might erase their magnanimity. It was in this manner that she first learned about the captain and medic in his vessel and watched as, for the second time in their lives, he found acceptance from someone who wasn’t her. She rejoiced in silence, that there was now someone who could match him as well, who could watch over him where she could not.

And as the months passed, something new began forming for each of them. T’Pring grew closer to the one who could have been hers, learned of his dreams and his habits, told him about her dreams in turn, gifted Stonn with glimpses of her inner self more freely. Spock started responding to McCoy’s entreaties and Kirk’s banter, started sharing his time and space without reluctance and trusted them with pieces of his unguarded self.

Though the topic was never openly discussed, each began to find that they needed the other a little less; that, at last, it wasn’t just the two of them against the universe. Who knew what might have happened, if things had progressed in this manner?

Life was easy, if not always painless. They were content in their lives; they were thriving in most ways.

Then, the reality they had foolishly chosen to ignore crashed upon them and their lives were upheaved as never before.

\-----

T’Pring reached the plateau of the koon-ut-kal-if-fee, locking away her dread and her bitterness lest she betrayed herself now in front of the venerable T’Pau. Everything in this place mocked her; the ceremony, the entourage, the ancient ruins around them.

In their youthful words, with the silences in their adulthood, they had made a plea to the universe: that she and Spock may never have to stand here and cheapen their bond through an act neither desired in this manner.

When T’Pau dashed her last, foolish hopes, when she declared that he indeed was in the Fever, she finally lifted her gaze from the ground, searching for him for the first time since her arrival.

Her beloved friend’s chosen companions were there, a clash of gold and blue with alien pink skin and a strange muteness about them in the air, but they could hold no more than a second of her attention when Spock was there, shaking, drawn and lost.

His mind, usually sharp as a diamond and humming with the pleasant chimes of a flute, was in chaos, crashing against her and retreating, at times unreachable and suddenly overwhelming. In the resonance of his katra she could taste the echoes of his fear of what was coming, before rational thought had finally deserted him.

They weren’t ready for this.

They hadn’t prepared for this.

Was this the conclusion to their story? Their quiet defiance of social norms, growing up and carving a place for themselves in spite of everything, all of it washed away by an outdated biological quirk? Were they to be once more unable to make the decision to be true to who they were, once more swept away by the currents of the reality assigned to them from the outside?

The choice was hers, for she was the only one left who could choose. If she acquiesced, where would they be after? If she challenged, what would remain?

If she challenged, she would spare him this, but she would trade it only for his death. Stonn would not know to hold back, would be driven to fight harder knowing of her desire for him and the Fever had already been present for too long, weakening Spock for days. What were their broken dreams and unspoken promises compared to his life?

Then, a wisp of a cloud moved in front of the sun and her eyes were drawn to the pink-skinned aliens that had come to the sacred ceremony out of love for her friend. In that moment, a whisper of an idea took form.

It wasn’t only a coupling that could end the Plak Tow. If her suspicions were correct, if these men were t’hy’la, if she chose one of _them_ … would that be enough to help Spock find his way back?

These humans who had found a way past walls that she had seen rise, becoming thicker and higher with each dashed hope, who had already proven to be resourceful enough to cheat death before and who had repeatedly chosen Spock already… could they find the perfect solution beyond her grasp?

Even if they didn’t and the human died… Spock would still be alive. Whichever she picked as champion, they could not stand to the superior strength of their race and they would not fight to destroy. If one of them died, Spock would have the other to soothe his regret.

If one of the humans died, their bond would break and he would despise her; and she would have Stonn. She would become just one more person who let his wellbeing be a second thought in her mind and Spock would find a way to survive, adding another layer to the fortress of his being.

Time was running out. Spock began moving towards the ceremonial gong in a daze and she hurried to follow.

If one of them died, she vowed fiercely, fuelled by the recklessness of her desperation and her bitterness at such an unfair universe, she would renounce Stonn to pay for her betrayal. She would move to the mountains to shed her emotions in Kolinahr; but one way or another, their youthful promise would be kept and Spock would live.

“Kal-if-fee!”

\-----

“T’Pring.”

“Spock.”

In the view-screen he looked tired and still too worn and too pale but his gaze was steady once again, his voice was strong and measured; his mind had returned.

“My captain lives,” he said immediately, “there has been no harm done that will not be repaired in time.”

“We have been fortunate,” she replied, trying to imbue the complex truth in the four simple words.

“T’Pring… We both know what you sacrificed for my sake, these last few years. Now that your duty to my family is fulfilled, may you and Stonn find prosperity in your shared future.”

There was no need for gratitude, no need for renewed assurances of his continued regard. Even if their paths were not one and the same any longer, they still ran parallel to one another.

Their lives would change, their bond had shifted, but it endured, still strong, still precious. She lifted her hand in the ta’al, watching him respond in turn.

“Live long, Spock, and prosper.”

“Peace and long life, my friend.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I'd love to hear what you thought of it :D


End file.
